Got Your Back. Spirit In Action. – John Adams
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DESCRIPTION
Trust that everything is working out. How do we know that? Let’s discuss.
SUMMARY
In this transcript, John Adams discusses the concept of trust and its importance in our lives. He shares a story about a woman named Vanessa who encountered a tree blocking her path and initially tried to push through it, but eventually listened to a small voice inside her and walked around the tree, leading to positive outcomes. John emphasizes the need to trust in our inner voice and the guidance it provides. He also talks about the importance of trust in relationships and how it can be challenging when trust is broken. John mentions the cycle of socialization and the need to recognize and challenge oppressive belief systems. He encourages cultivating flexibility in life and being open to both leading and following. John concludes by expressing gratitude for the community and the power of collective consciousness in manifesting positive change.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
John Adams (00:03):
Thank you so much. That was so beautiful. I love having friends up here. It’s so much fun. Good morning everybody. I’m John. How are you? Good to see you. Happy, pride, happy all that. So it was an interesting week to work on because I find trust is something that’s so personal. It’s something that you have to find our way into on our own in some ways. And so finding a way to get into it and talk about it in a way that speaks to a group was, oh, okay, here we go. So I’ll start with a little story. So Vanessa was on her path and she was one of those people who knew where she was going, and she was very clear and very determined and very focused. She was just moving forward onto her path. And I did do a couple of slides, so I know Ben’s going to help me with this. So one of these days, as she was going along her path, she encountered this guy, this big giant tree in her way, in her path.
(01:20):
And so she did what? She was like, well, I know this is where I’m supposed to go. This is the way I’m supposed to go. And so she looked at it and she was like, well, she tried pushing against it and the tree didn’t really do anything. And being a spiritual person, she stopped and she just said, I’m going to take a breath and I’m going to know that this tree has no reality for me because this is the way my path is going to be, and I know this tree isn’t here. And so she just stepped forward and banged her face right into the tree.
(01:56):
And within her and deep inside there was a small quiet voice that just said, walk around. It’s okay, just walk around. But she refused to listen to it because that’s not my path. My path isn’t this way, my path is this way. I can’t go that way or that way. I have to go this way. And she spent a great deal of time fighting with this tree and not moving forward until finally she gave up. She listened to the small voice and she said, okay, fine. And she walked around the tree. And then everything that she was looking for in her path unfolded before her as she just stepped out and stepped forward listening to that still small voice. And to me, the metaphysical lesson in this isn’t that she did anything wrong. There was nothing wrong with trying to push on the tree. There was nothing wrong with holding that thought that this tree isn’t really got any power over her. Those are all good things to try. I think if anything, if I were coaching at all, I would coach her to trust. Trust that inner small voice inside trust that it is leading you to that which you see for yourself. That which is your vision, that your future pole, that which is pulling you forward.
(03:22):
Sometimes that can be hard, right? To know when is it spirit? When is it me being in my ego? When is it me being in my stubbornness? Which yeah, that happens. And I think the only way to do it, the only way that I could do it, and all I can do is share with you what my experience is. My experience of it is I just have to try. I have to experiment. I have to say, I think this is the still small voices telling me to do this, and I’m going to follow this and see what happens. And I learned to differentiate that which is that inner knowing, that inner light, that inner life, that thing we call God that is within us here in cityside and incentives for spiritual living. We don’t think of God as something outside of ourselves that we’re pleading with or negotiating with.
(04:14):
It is that love that is within, that is ever within. It is ever present. It is ever perfect and is ever expressing. And when we trust into that, some really cool things start to unfold. And so the only way that I know to do that is to do it, is to really practice it. And this song that Paige sang for us, and Greg played so beautifully really said it. It’s like trusting in each other. So I’ve been taking classes at Second City and learning improv and doing improv. In fact, I did a show on Friday night a set with some friends. And it’s very, very challenging to do it because there’s no script, there’s no nothing. Sometimes we’ll get a prompt from the audience and they’ll say, give me a location or whatever. And then we just have to make something up from that simple suggestion.
(05:14):
When you’re particularly with a group of people, it can feel very vulnerable. You’re very vulnerable As we step out and just express, there’s this expression, this mantra that we use improv that’s called Got Your Back. And we say that over and over again. Got your back, got your back, got your back. And I love that because it is about knowing that as I am stepping out and living in this vulnerable place, that the people around me are in the same space, the same consciousness that we are holding that consciousness for each other. And that is to me what spiritual community is. That’s what we are doing here. We are part of centers for spiritual living. We are committing to living spiritually. And that means stepping into that trust, trusting, and there’s a vulnerability to that. And so we help each other and we find each other and we support each other and we love each other and we know we recognize that we’re stepping into this space of vulnerability of this trust and this trust experiment of, okay, I’m going to trust.
(06:24):
I’m going to try it. You’ve probably had these pings, these experiences of intuition, of knowing, right? I am looking at Linda because we were just talking about moving, and when I saw my apartment, the one that I’m going to move into, I’m moving next week, next week, and I saw the apartment I walked in, I said, yes, there was just something in me that was a yes. And I don’t even know why on paper if I sat and thought about it logically, there were reasons why this probably wasn’t the best space. But my intuition said yes. And I think as I sat with it, I think it’s more about I needed to shift the energy in my life. I needed to make a change in my life. I don’t know if this is the place that I’m going to stay in forever, but I know that making this change was trusting in that inner voice.
(07:14):
It was saying, yeah, this is the time. Same thing with Cityside. When we moved into the space that we saw, it was like, well, perfect. No, but it’s something about it is right? There’s a rightness to it. If we trust that inner voice, we move forward in it. And this idea of spirit’s got our back, right? Ernest Holmes says, there is no power in the universe which wishes anyone ill. Life is good and God is good. So this is an example of something that I should have put on a slide and it didn’t. But anyway, there is no power in the universe which wishes anyone else. Life is good and God is good. So we trust into that. We go into this process of centering ourselves in that inner knowing and living from that space. So that’s one thing that I wanted to talk about this morning.
(08:07):
The other thing I want to talk about is this idea of when trust is broken is a little harder to talk about, right? And we can have that experience in so many different ways in our lives. When someone shows up and they end up showing us who they are through the breaking of trust, we thought they were one thing, they ended up being somebody else. So in some ways it’s good information like, okay, I now see that that’s where your consciousness is. I thought you were over here, but you’re really here. Okay, good information for me to know. And in that moment, what I think I’m being called to do if I’m going to live a spiritual life and be in my commitment to that is I am being called to still hold unconditional love. That can be hard for somebody who’s broken your trust.
(09:06):
But the way I think of it, and I’ll just share how I think about it, I think of it as I can still love you. If you’ve broken my trust, I can still see that you are an expression of divine source that is in this world. I’m just not going to let you in. You don’t have access here. It doesn’t mean I’m going to withhold my love. It just means that I’m not going to let you in. Does that make sense? And because I’m living in this spirit of unconditional love, I know that it is possible for you to change. I know it is possible for you to live, grow, and move beyond the consciousness that you’re holding now. So I’m going to let you go do your work, but I’m going to let you go do your work over there, over there, go do your work, and once you’ve done your work, come back and let’s have a conversation.
(10:01):
I can stay centered in that spiritual truth and that foundational truth that I want, the place that I want to live from. One of the ways that trust can be broken that I think is really, really, really challenging. And I didn’t quite know how to talk about this, but I’m going to talk about it and we’ll just dive in and see what happens. And that is when we experience oppression. Oppression is when some group or person or group decides that they’re the dominant and everybody else falls underneath, we experience that and we can see that in the world form. We can probably all point it out. It’s pride month. So I’ll call out L-G-B-T-Q-A community that has had experiences of oppression and just, I wasn’t going to cite a lot of data and statistics and all that, but I do want to call out one data point that I thought was interesting given that it is pride month.
(10:57):
And that is something I saw on Instagram that the crime and negativity coming at the L-G-B-T-Q community in the United Kingdom in England has risen 462%, huge percentage. So just to give some context of there is this consciousness that keeps creeping in, that is this oppressive, dominant cultured consciousness. So our work is both in those of us who have had the experience of being the oppressed as well as those who of us who have found ourselves living in the community, people who have been the oppressors, and bringing to consciousness those places where we have learned and accepted this oppressive kind of belief system.
(12:02):
The way I do it, the way that helps me is I lean into a lot of different resources, and one of the resources I like a lot is Bobby Harrow. You may have heard of Bobby. Bobby wrote an essay, the Cycle of Socialization, and you can go to the next slide, Ben. So I had to scan it out of the book. I couldn’t find it, and I know you probably can’t read it, and that’s okay. I’m not going to read through this. I just wanted to give you a sense of what it looks like and invite you into finding this on your own and doing this research. I actually have a citation where you can find it that we’ll look at in a minute. And the reason I’m not going to get into it too deeply is because then it turns this into a workshop, which is’ the intention.
(12:48):
But the reason I like the cycle of socialization is because when you’re doing this work, if you’re like me, a white guy and trying to find my way in this world, I was socialized into a certain way of seeing and viewing the world. I was socialized into believing things, particularly at my generation when I was growing up. It was like, who would be the CEO of the company? You immediately, male man, white man is the CEO of the company. It’s taken time and it is starting to change, but it’s still predominantly a lot of white guys at the head of the companies, things like that. There are these unconscious biases that come up that when we start to surface, them can feel really uncomfortable. But one of the ways to get objectivity is to understand this cycle of socialization that we were invited in at some juncture.
(13:47):
You can see there are entry points all along the circle where we get invited into this cycle and it’s self perpetuating, it keeps reinforcing itself, and we keep spinning around in this cycle. And having that objectivity I think makes it a little easier and a little, just take some of the discomfort out so that you can do the work so that you can go deeper. Because what happens in this kind of work is we tend to go only so far and then we’re like, I’m really uncomfortable and now this is as deep as I’m going to go. So this allows that to go even deeper. And as we do that, we can step more into the trust of spirit, trust of love, because wherever we’re holding bias, this is beautiful. I don’t know about this group over here. It isn’t their problem. It’s my problem because I’m not inviting in a whole aspect of love, a whole aspect of God, if you will, into my life and my life experience.
(14:49):
The other way that I hold it and that I’ve shared in other moments of public talking is there are people in my life who are in these oppressed communities who I love, and I don’t want them to be hurt, and I don’t want to cause hurt or harm. And so bringing this into my consciousness helps me see the world through new eyes. So that’s an invitation to think about the cycle of socialization and how it can cultivate this deeper trust in ourselves to know that I have looked at the things that I’ve held consciously, the things that I’ve held unconsciously, and I have brought some light to that. The thing about the cycle of socialization is it’s taught to us. We’re recruited into it by the people we love the most, but the people we trust the most in our lives. And so it can be very, very, very difficult to get out of it. Bobby Harrow has a complimentary cycle that goes with this. The cycle of liberation and the cycle of liberation is being liberated out of this to, and there are different entry points there as well, that you come into this and start to see the world as Cityside asserts for itself and its mission, safe and inclusive space, we start to create that in real time for ourselves and for our community.
(16:27):
Ernest Holmes says, the spiral of life is upward. Evolution carries us forward, not backward. Eternal and progressive expansion is law so that when we’re doing this work, we are in harmony with that law, with that understanding, I have this quote by a brilliant author, me, and here’s the quote, I’ll read it. I wanted to get it right. It is important not just to be against things. It is equally important to know what we are for and that we practice coming back and centering ourselves in that again and again, that we calibrate our mental and emotional and spiritual energy toward the forward momentum of positivity while recognizing the shadow side of our value system, which is the things that we’re against. So what I mean by that is I can be for peace and against war. So the value and the positivity and the forward momentum for me as being for peace.
(17:29):
And at the same time I can recognize what I call its shadow side, which is anti-war. I don’t want to focus on that because I think that starts to constrict, starts to bring me into more of a narrow consciousness. I want to focus on the piece. I want to focus on the love. I want to focus on the inclusion. I want to focus on the positivity, but I want to keep my awareness that the shadow side exists and know and recognize it. So I’m not denying that it doesn’t exist. I’m allowing it to have its presence, but my focus and my energy and my intention is on positivity. So that’s the teaching, right? That’s the hard part. When we step into trust, we trust that inner knowing. We trust the community that we’re in, this beautiful spiritual community got our back, and we trust in the work that we are doing, the work that we’re called to do, which is clearing away that which no longer serves us or the people around us that we call in every single person in our life that we call in this community of diverse, beautiful, gorgeous people. Part of the way that can show up too is cultivating this flexibility in life, right? There are moments in my life where I’m called to be in leadership, and there are moments in my life where I’m called to follow and how willing am I to move back and forth?
(19:07):
And I’m very willing, I’m happy to follow. Leadership is hard. I’m taking a leadership class soon, so hoping to learn more. There’s always more to learn that sometimes it isn’t even about leading or following, it’s just bearing witness. It’s just sitting and taking it in and letting it have its way with you and processing through it. But however, and wherever you’re at, at any given moment, trusting in that inner voice to help. When is it my time to learn lead? When is it my time to follow? When is it my time to just take in the information and just be with it and just be with life and what I know to be true? This is what I know to be true is that it’s all going to work out. You’re going to be fine. It’s all working out. As Paige saying for us earlier, we got each other’s back.
(20:09):
We got this love that is real and living this spiritual life and committing to living this spiritual life. Yes, sometimes it is work. It’s much easier to just let somebody give me some dogma and just follow that dogma and just I can turn my brain off and just follow somebody else’s truth. It’s much harder to create and cultivate my own philosophy and find my own way and own that. And we have free will. Whatever’s right for you is right for you. And I know that as we live this spiritual life that we’re ever evolving, as Ernest Holmes reminded us, we are ever finding that which is new. We’re ever more finding more love, more grace, more ease, more acceptance, more inclusion, more peace, more joy. And the trees don’t even bother us anymore when they get in the way. Our path is that fuller expression of love.
(21:19):
That’s really all I have for you today. So I’m going to pray this in and I know that. See, this is when I say something like that, friends start to appear. It’s amazing. It’s so great. I just feel so blessed to have the music team that we have to have the tech team and Ben’s back there running things like a madman and Connie’s holding space for us and making sure that everything unfolds right, and Paul’s doing his thing. And I’m just so grateful for each and every single one of you just showing up and bringing your heart into this space. And I know you’ll be bringing it into the new space. And so just centering in on this life, this love that is cityside, that is in and around, and we’re experiencing it right here, right now. I just know that this love is unfolding in ways expected and unexpected, and everywhere and every when time doesn’t matter in prayer and spirit, this prayer is calling from within, that love, that light, that life that is within it is not calling out to some old man in the sky.
(22:32):
We’re changing that polarity. We’re calling it from this heart-centered space. And we know that as we do that we can connect to each other, connect one to another, that there is if this love and life and unconditional truth is true for me, it is true for each and every single one of you and we are connected into it in ways that is miraculous. So from this place and knowing this truth, I just see and know each and every single person finding their way with love, finding their way with this truth, finding their way with uncovering and bringing into awareness and into consciousness. Any places that are not serving them any longer, any places where unconscious bias, where unconscious fear may be ruling the day, and we can let that go, and we trust that spirit has our back and that our spiritual community has our back, that we can trust into the love that simply is.
(23:36):
And we know that as we do that, everything is working out exactly right. So I just sit in the stream of energy of this consciousness knowing that as we lift our hearts up in this awareness, that we are joining in with a community, with a continuum that is all around the universe of liked souls who are doing the same thing right here right now. And we know that the power of this mastermind of consciousness is bringing a shift to all around us, all those situations and circumstances that seem so immovable suddenly become very pliable, and things start to shift. And so I know true blessings for each and every single person, and I’m so grateful for and so grateful for the manifestation of this love in each person’s life. So grateful for the way this unfolds. So grateful for each and every single person saying, yes, I am going to live a spiritual life. So grateful for all of this great goodness and this beautiful, beautiful community. I release this now into the action of the law. I know that by doing this, I assert my faith. I affirm my faith to know that this is the way the law works. As I hold this in consciousness, I know that it is done. I know that it is here it is now, and collectively and together we all say, and so it’s us.
Paige Kizer (25:05):
Thank you, John.